Mail from d.a.levy was never simply mail. Frugal, busy, impoverished, generous,
and concise as he was, the letters were usually brief, and typed on a sheet of
letterhead size paper which heíd torn in half so the remainder could be used for
something else. Even had he not been a stamp collector at one time, he probably
would have recycled stamps, gluing used stamps that had escaped cancellation
onto the envelope with what seemed to be rubber cement. The envelope, large or
small, usually included some sort of publication - often his own, but at times a
magazine or book published by someone else. His immediate mission seemed
proselytization: he thought he knew what you needed and part of his job was to
share his enthusiasms and convictions about poetry and other arts. You could see
the extras in the envelopes as postal variants on the publications he hawked on the
street, often giving them free to people he thought needed them. He also donated
some of what he read to local libraries. Immediately before his death, he sent out
packages to his friends and correspondents. Many contained books. Some
contained sheaves of images he had clipped out of glossy mainstream magazines
to use in collages, perhaps hoping, as he did with the books and magazines, that
the recipients would make active use of them in their own work.

In the autumn of 1967 (if my memory reconstruction is accurate), I received a
letter from him with copies of Le lettrisme, the official magazine of the
French Lettrist group, folded up and inserted along with the torn sheet on which
heíd typed his message. I donít recall him mentioning why he included the
magazines. He might simply have done so because I was studying French lit at
school. His reading in French poetry, philosophy, and theater was extensive,
though apparently done in English translation. He may have received the
magazines in exchange for publications he'd sent to French poets. The Lettrist
magazines were, at that time, rather crudely produced, and were more concerned
with film, sound poetry, and socio-political commentary than the visual poetry the
group would later be more strongly identified with, though levy may have thought
that the graphic nature of some pages related to my visual poetry. In retrospect, the
most unusual, and the most meaningful aspect of this mail was that Lettrism was
scarcely known in the U.S. at the time. The majority of the Americans who ran
under the banner of "concrete" poetry, even before the Emmett Williams
anthology had reduced the genre to the brittle minimalism that the overwhelming
majority of readers would overwhelmingly reject as underwhelmingly trivial, were
not looking toward Lettrism for inspiration. It is possible that levy was seriously
interested in Lettrism; yet it seems more likely that hints at Lettrist tropes in some
of his own poems came not directly from the French group, but from the European
and Latin American poets who picked up ideas from the Lettrists. The Lettrist
magazines levy sent not only introduced me to Lettrism, they gave me a glimpse
into the huge net of levy's correspondences and his attempts at finding out
everything that might be relevant and useful to him.

In the spring of the next year, a Lettrist splinter group, the Situationists, would be
a driving force for what came to be called "the student revolt" in France. The
events of the Paris Spring included the largest wildcat strike in history - over 11
million workers in a country of 55 million walked off their jobs, many to set up
barricades in streets and roads throughout France. Since this was also the largest
decentralized revolt in history, the press and the powers that were found it
incomprehensible, and had to identify it with something they could grasp. The
media successfully made the exceedingly loose coalition of everything from
teamsters' unions to eccentric philosophers fit the stereotypes of student
demonstrations happening throughout the world at the time. The Situationists
provided a vocabulary and some root ideas to a disorganized conjunction of socio-
political optimism and revulsion against the De Gaul administration, but nobody
was really in control of anything. That the Communist Party played the decisive
role in making deals with the government that returned the country to conservative
normalcy shows just how uneasy a decentralized revolution could make those on
both ends of the political spectrum, including those who previously seemed most
radical. As a student myself, I was more than happy to believe the media
deception of students taking over the country. Of the many oddities of the May
revolt of 1968, one of the strangest was that a seemingly tight-knit cadre of
śsthetes had come closer to bringing about political change (albeit in conjunction
with an odd spectrum of non-artistic groups) than any of the more somber and
dedicated revolutionary art movements of the century. For serious students of left-
wing politics, the rapid dissolution of the revolt may seem a lesson in the inability
of decentralism to succeed in maintaining a victory, even one that briefly went
beyond anybody's wildest dreams. Another political aspect of the uprising didnít
fully reveal itself for several decades. Revolutionaries from France, including
Situationist silkscreen artists, went to Mexico City to try to assist in related
demonstrations at the Olympics in October of 1968. The massacre of
demonstrators at this event was the bloodiest of the era. The official body count
was 300 dead, though most sources claim that's a laughable underestimate. Many
who took part in the protests would reemerge as more violent activists throughout
Latin America, particularly in the attempts at revolution in Central America in the
1980s.

For me personally, a curious and fruitful chain of events started with the copies of
Le lettrisme I received from levy. In 1997, 30 years later, with the
cooperation of David Seaman and Alain Satiť, I set up the Lettrist movement's
first official, consecrated web site. As a participant in the mimeo revolution of the
1960s, the opening of the web in the 1990s seemed like a return to the days of
cranking publications out on mimeo machines. My site remained Lettrism's
official electronic manifestation until November, 2004. In addition to the world's
response to the U.S. election results, it was long past time for the official site to
come from France, which was, after all, the movement's home. The Lettrists have
not asked me to take down my Lettrist site, and as I write, it is undergoing an
overhaul and expansion with their cooperation and encouragement, but the days of
it being the main Lettrist site are over. Still, one of the proudest feathers in my
web master's cap was that this quintessentially Parisian movement should have its
web site emanate from a small apartment and student grade equipment in the great
French metropolis of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

levy's life, work, and home town are tied together in a way more reminiscent of
the middle ages or antiquity than Anglo-America. Even Charles Olson's
Gloucester seems less important in comparison, while Dante's relation to Florence
comes across as more relevant. Likewise, more than his contemporaries, levy is
tightly tied into a brief time period, to the point where some commentators see
him as the centerpiece of an as yet unmade documentary of the 1960s
counterculture. Both Cleveland and the 60s are essential to an understanding of
levy as a poet, but it is easy to be side-tracked by superficialities of both. The
purpose of this paper is to suggest larger motives and contexts for the poet in time
and place, which in turn may bring levy's relation to the city and the era into
clearer focus - or higher resolution, as we might put it in the digital age. levy does
more to define the era than virtually any of his more celebrated contemporaries.

*

levy claimed over and over again that he wanted to bring civilization and
enlightenment to Cleveland. To some extent, this reflects the arrogance of the era
and of youthful presumptions, and to some extent it acted as a defense during the
years he was under increasing assault by the powers that existed in Cleveland. As
easy as it is to dismiss his remarks as rhetorical, it seems more instructive to take a
careful look at his claims.

Square one for levy in the search for civilization and enlightenment came from
reading. He said on several occasions that starting to read had prevented him from
killing himself, had given him something to live for, and had proved pivotal in his
thinking. He wrote that once he started, he tried to read everything he could. This
is not as much of an exaggeration as it sounds. Early encounters with serious
reading took place in several stages, first in the public school system then small
public libraries. Perhaps the limitations of their collections helped him develop
skills in finding what would be most important to him. It seems likely that they
provided enough of a tease to make him desire further range of resources and to
pursue books more avidly. Whatever the case, pursue them he did, and with
increasing dedication and thoroughness. The plethora in our own time of books on
subjects that interested him may make it a bit difficult to realize how hard to get
were many of the books most important to him. Of lists of bookstores in
Cleveland at the time, there does not seem to be one of the traditional "Occult"
variety, in which you'd find a proprietor looking something like Aleister Crowley
or Madame Blavatsky charting ephemeries in the back of the shop, and a jumble
of often delectably odd but not particularly relevant books on the shelves. His
friends don't mention anything like a Theosophical Society Reading Room. These
would have been the most likely sources of books on Buddhism in other cities, but
even in these venues, the selection of work that would have interested levy would
have been sparse. There may have been Buddhist temples in the city, but no levy
friends mention them, and they would probably have been for Asian immigrants
and their descendants who wisely tried to maintain their distance from occidentals.
New Age bookstores and Zen Centers were simply not part of the urban landscape
of the day. Although this was a period when paperback book publication expanded
rapidly, books of the poetry of the immediate present would have appeared
infrequently on store shelves. Readers could find a reasonable selection of New
Directions and Grove Press books easily enough, and probably few books by such
presses as City Lights. Like young poets elsewhere in the U.S., they probably read
these over and over, often enough until the pages fell out of the bindings, but the
plethora of alternative publishers we find now was in the process of being created
- in Cleveland perhaps more than any other city.

It's important to see how much depth and detail levy could glean from the limited
range of the libraries he frequented early on. His best editors, Ingrid Swanberg and
Alan Horvath, do not cease to be amazed at the scope of sources in the work, and
have at times discovered that words or phrases which initially seemed typos or
neologisms turn out to be precise references to concepts, practices, and persons
who remain esoteric even with the greatly enhanced reference tools available
today. I can find myself equally surprised by correctly used words and phrases
from languages and topics unusual to American readers, and references to artists
and movements not particularly familiar 40 years later. This only increases with
my familiarity with the subject. He showed, for instance, a more detailed
knowledge of pre-Columbian central Mexican mythology and culture than any
other Anglo-American poet of his day whom I can think of.

Although levy's early reading may have been solitary, and to some extent a
remedy for loneliness, frustration, and boredom, by 1963 it had taken on distinct
social characteristics. levy found himself with a growing number of friends who
not only shared each others' books, but actively discussed them, and, more
importantly, tried to bring the ideas in them into their active lives. These were not
voyeurs or hobbyists, but young people looking for a new way of living in and
experiencing the world. Their level of expertise and erudition varied, and may not
seem profound by the standards of people who are now older and have more
resources to draw on. But they showed the same eagerness and effort that seems to
take place among young people on the eve of major changes in the arts. And as
with other young people at modern transition points, it's important to note that the
majority came from working or middle class backgrounds, had at best modest
formal education, and were strongly self-motivated. A measure of their
commitment was the pattern through levy's adult life of people supplying him
with books and a place to stay provided he continue writing and
publishing.

Finding no guidance or energy in the mainstream elders of Cleveland, levy grew
more serious about the need to bring civilization and enlightenment to the city.
Outside the mainstream, he found encouragement and direction from discussion
groups held by Adelaide Simon and Russell Atkins, from the ad hoc library they
assembled, and, with Jau Billera, the Free Lance imprint publications, which they
oversaw. Exposed to a larger range of work, and able to discuss it with peers, he
also seems to have realized that if he was going to bring about some kind of
change, he had a lot to learn. He would have to figure out the details of his
intuitive gospel while preaching it. His reading seems to have acquired an
additional intensity and concentration as he saw a greater need to expand the
perceptions and capacities of the people around him.

Not content to be a passive reader, and with a strong belief that the poetry he and
his friends wrote had major significance, levy decided to print his own books and
magazines. He started doing this on a small greeting card size letterpress in 1963.
Descriptions of his handling of type suggest that printing may not have been part
of mandatory industrial arts classes in his high school, and he apparently had to
teach himself how to use the press. The results tended to be unimpressive from a
technical point of view. This type of printing, particularly on a miniature press,
took a lot of time, and manic energy seems to have gotten him through sometimes
painfully long hours of concentration.

As soon as he could manage, he went over to producing his publications by
mimeo. Perhaps mimeo publications levy received influenced his move to this
production method. In the early stages, he would not have thought of himself as
part of a "mimeo revolution." Mimeo was simply there for the taking.
Mimeograph machines were common features of offices of all sorts - the first I
used was in the junior high school of which my father was principal. Opportunities
to use those available, with or without permission, presented themselves often
enough. Manufacturers of the machines suggested the use of a heavy, absorbent
paper, sold by them, but you could use other stocks or "liberate" some of the
standard stuff from the office you moved into after hours. Mimeo machines were
inexpensive enough so that you could buy one without unconquerable strain on a
limited budget. Tom Kryss reports buying his first machine at Sears Roebuck for
$75 in 1966. A year later, he and rjs picked up a reconditioned A.B. Dick for about
$125. For comparison's sake, in 1967, my tuition at the University of Wisconsin
was $105 a semester, a first class postage stamp sold for five cents, you could send
several pounds of books via library rate for something like eleven cents; Allen
Ginsbergís Howl and Other Poems from City Lights sold for seventy five
cents, and the New Directions edition of Kenneth Patchen's Hallelujah
Anyway retailed for $1.25.

Other methods were available and used by levy. Hectograph, for instance, gave
you more flexibility with graphics, though its purple inks were not as legible,
often faded quickly, and their smell was strange. Legend had it that you could get
high from sniffing it, but I had no such luck. I doubt that anyone else did more
than make up stories about it. Silkscreen was the great graphic technology of the
period, largely forgotten now because it was not saved by libraries. Still, it was
part of the basic tool kit, and Tom Kryss continued using it long after other poets
had moved to other methods.

Despite claims to the contrary by people who commented on mimeo publication
after it had ceased to be used, mimeo was not conducive to graphics. levy
published what people at the time called "typewriter poems," in which designs
could be created by retyping the same words or letters. In addition to his own
poems in this genre, levy did a book by Dom Sylvester Houedard, a monk living
in England, and perhaps the supreme master and authority on the genre. Good
quality production of visual poetry, illustrations, and even letters other than what
we'd now consider the standard ASCII set, however, were extremely difficult.
You could have stencils electrostatically engraved, but these were expensive, and
the quality was not particularly good. Although mimeo manufacturers sold all
sorts of styli and other devices for inscribing stencils, the rubbery surface was not
cooperative to an artist or even a skilled lithographer. Some of us tried techniques
as odd as holding stencils near light bulbs to make them blister and crack or
rubbed them on the sidewalk or bricks in hopes of producing relief from the type
and inscribed images which usually looked clumsy and childish. Ingrid Swanberg
identifies the small, inset drawing on the cover of the 1968 Zero Edition of
Suburban Monastery Death Poem as drawn on a mimeo stencil with a can
opener by Barb OíConnelly, wife of literary collaborator, D.r. Wagner. Telling
Jokes about the difficulties, such as drawing on a mimeo stencil was comparable
to writing with the claw of a hammer on a used condom, made up a sub-genre of
their own. But for text, you could type a basic mimeo stencil as quickly as you
could use a typewriter with paper, making corrections with a green or blue
equivalent of the liquid white-out used in ordinary typing. If you had a decent and
well-maintained machine, you could produce a flyer or a broadside in as little as
an hour, and a chapbook in a day. Mechanical difficulties could slow the process
down considerably on some machines, and perhaps there's a bit of irony in the
superior results you could obtain by using a machine that someone else took better
care of than did most literary mimeographers. Still, mimeo publication lent itself
to the sometimes fast-moving political events of the era, and often enough there
was little distinction between literary and activist publications. Although levy
would later find ways around the graphic limitations of the medium, speed and
lack of expense made it the ideal medium for the times and particularly for levyís
poverty, sense of mission, and urgency.

In an environment of growing readership and active publication, Jim Lowell
opened his first Asphodel Book Shop in 1963. The first store was located among
offices on the fourth floor of a building whose first two floors housed a shopping
arcade. Part of Lowell's stock consisted of relatively conventional titles, as well as
a significant stock of what we would now call alternative publications. The rare
and unusual publications were most important to Lowell, and his wide-ranging
and encyclopedic knowledge of the field made him almost unique among book
store proprietors in the country at the time. It's difficult to overestimate the
influence of the store or of Lowell's knowledge and interests on the poetry scene
in Cleveland and on levy's development as a poet. The store's clientele consisted
primarily of young people who alienated the arcade operators. Lowell would find
himself arrested along with levy and have part of his stock confiscated, would
move to several other locations, and finally become for many years the most
important poetry distributor in Anglo-America between lower Manhattan and San
Francisco. As he moved from one shop to another, Lowell began to rely more on
mail order sales until that became almost his entire business.

However much levy and Lowell encouraged and made contacts for each, levy
came to realize early on that as important as a local bookstore might be, and as
much as he could pass out publications on the street, he would need a means of
getting them sold outside Cleveland. Producing books wasn't enough: once
produced you needed a means of distribution. For levy, Ezra Pounds definition of
poetry as "news that stays news," had a particular relevance and urgency. The
news might stay news, but it had to circulate quickly in the ever growing and
accelerating literary dispensation of the era. His publications gave him a form of
currency which he could use in exchanges for more of the news that stays news
from other places. The correspondences that grew up around his publishing efforts
increased his need to make forays outside Cleveland not just for kicks, but to meet
other writers and extend the face-to-face conversations that had grown up among
his friends at home. Despite his travels in the west, he seemed to feel a greater
affinity to poets living on the east coast. His contacts with writers on that coast
preceded his trips to New York, and this may have been one of the reasons he had
contacts lined up when he arrived in the city.

Mobility includes several layers of oddness. At a time when driving cars was
essential to the core of being for most young American males, levy was a
dedicated pedestrian and hitch-hiker. He had a driver's license, and it's possible
that he didn't drive because he couldn't afford a car. He loved the life of streets
and may have wanted to stay close to it in cities. Part of the framework of
Cleveland Undercovers is a walk through the city. Given his profound sense of
economy, he may not have wanted to be encumbered with a car when he could get
around by other means. That he had started hitch hiking in his teens meant that he
was a veteran of the art by his twenties. Whatever his motives and skills, he was
not confined to Cleveland, riding his thumb or otherwise grabbing rides as far as
the coasts and Mexico. That he showed up in Milwaukee several times, once either
on the way to or from Madison, suggests that he may have taken other mid-range
excursions in the upper midwest - not simply to the area immediately around
Cleveland, but also to other cities in the Great Lakes region.

I haven't been able to determine whether levy's first visit to lower Manhattan was
in 1963 or 1964, but he did make at least three sojourns in the city before his
death. His correspondence had put him in touch with some of the most active
poets on the scene at the time. As luck or fate would have it, this may have been
the densest and most pluralistic reading scene in history. The full spectrum of
what would latter become more rigidly defined coteries such as the Beats, Black
Mountain, Fluxus, Umbra, Deep Image, and New York Schools read together
without significant friction at bars and coffee houses such as Les Deux Megots in
the East Village and the Cino in the West Village on a regular basis. Readers
included poets such as Armand Schwerner, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg,
who had not completely identified themselves with any existing tendency or
clique yet on the scene. The pluralism of the time could draw on the cornucopia of
literary and artistic resources crammed together in a small area. Despite the strong
misogyny of the early and middle 60s, lower Manhattan provided a milieu for
women writers not found elsewhere. These women ranged from one of the most
inventive poets of the time, Rochelle Owens, to Diane Wakoski, perhaps the first
woman of the era who could become widely popular without compromising her
non-conformist base. Carol Bergé, who developed a particularly
supportive friendship with levy, not only wrote beautiful lyrics, but got around the
sexism of the time by making herself indispensable as an organizer of readings
and other events. In addition to the avant garde poets on the scene, formal
conservatives also read along with their more unorthodox colleagues. The
audiences could include creative people of all sorts and statures: the area was
particularly dense with painters and musicians of all types, as well as
representatives of virtually all forms of theater. Equidistant from Maxís Kansas
City and the Filmore East, Les Deux Megots could bring in as diverse a crew as
any venue in the world. In a time when mixed media was growing self-
consciously, individuals were mixing media on an intuitive level as well. You
could, for instance, see Ed Sanders read as a poet, sing with the Fugs, and tend his
bookstore in the time frame of perhaps two days. Whether or not John Cage, Andy
Warhol, John Coltrane, Richard Schechner, Bob Dylan, even the aging Marcel
Duchamp appeared in the bars and coffee houses, you might see several of them
on a single walk in the vicinity, and there was no reason why you couldn't go from
the Cino to at least one of the major galleries, theaters, and musical or intermedia
performance spaces within a few minutes, or spend several hours at each in the
course of a single day. Some of the reading spaces encouraged active discussion
along with readings, and the tendency was to move away from a strict division
between active performer and passive audience. I haven't found anyone who
remembers levy reading in any of these venues, Carol Bergé told me he
did not, and the one account I've seen of him reading contains an anachronism and
other internal problems, but he certainly made his share of contacts at them.

So far we have a more or less standard story of a young poet going to the artistic
capitol and finding wonders. But the story makes a major paradigm shift in levyís
case. As much as he loved New York, he never seems to have entertained the idea
of staying there. Despite his sometimes bitter relationship with Cleveland, it
remained his city and base of operations. In fact, he seems to have been trying to
create a scene in his home town that would serve as a partner with the metropolis,
rather than the traditional role of a farm from which the bigger city could skim
those with the most ability.

Several people have said that his first visit to New York inspired levy to set up
readings in the basement of a church, as a venue called "The Gate." The
persecution that eventually cost him his life began with reading poems there, but it
seems likely that he would have tried to set up readings whether he'd attended
them in New York or not. This was a time when poetry was breaking out of the
restraints of silence and invisibility. Decorous and refined readings by visiting
poets were not unusual on college campuses and a fair number were even hosted
by civic and cultural organizations. Although models for hip readings might have
been in part modeled on those of the San Francisco area and Lower Manhattan,
other sources as quaint as choral reading societies also provided models. Young
writers from all over North America insisted on being heard and set up readings in
venues ranging from coffee houses to public parks. levy's early publications,
predictably, had been of his own work and that of his fellow Clevelanders. By
1964, his publication list included a large number of the poets who read at the bars
and coffee houses in lower Manhattan. If he was simply picking up scraps and
tokens from Gotham, he would have been repeating a traditional model of
centralism. This is precisely what he was not doing. Instead of picking up their
scraps, he was publishing their important work of the period before they did so in
New York.

It's interesting to note that despite placing herself in an essential position in
organizing readings at the succession of lower east side coffee shops - 10th Street,
Les Deux Megots, and Le Metro - her position in LeRoi Jones's landmark
anthology, Four Young Lady Poets, and other collections and zines, Carol
Bergé's first solo book was not published in New York, but by levy in
Cleveland. Iím not sure how many other first books he published by the people he
met in New York, but he did publish some of the earliest solo works of Ted
Berrigan, Paul Blackburn, Margaret Randall, Ed Sanders, and Charles Bukowski.
He also began publishing poets living elsewhere, from Doug Blazek in Chicago to
bpNichol in Canada to Dom Sylvester Houedard in England. Although I generally
avoid commentary on levy's poetry in this paper to keep it from overshadowing
other essential points, it's clear that by 1965, levy was writing better poetry than
many of the poets who read in lower Manhattan, and that he was publishing not as
a supplicant, but as a peer. Clearly, he was not simply publishing major work by
the New Yorkers, he was grabbing the news that stays news when it first became
news wherever it came from, trying to equate poets at home with those living
elsewhere, and trying to put Cleveland on the international literary map in the
process. An essential part of bringing civilization and enlightenment to Cleveland
was not simply teaching lessons to his fellow rubes, but putting them in a position
where they could join in the process of forming what he would consider an
enlightened civilization. Enlightenment and civilization are not conditions that can
be deposited in empty receptacles, but require active participation on the part of all
involved.

levy had become one of the main figures in what we now call the mimeo
revolution. Although the major strength of the movement was its tendency to
decentralize and to reduce hierarchies, we can see several high points in the
mimeo dispensation. Ed Sanders's Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
tends to get top billing among zines of the era. It may have contained the largest
volume of the best poetry. Whether it did or not, it did not use mimeo as anything
but an expedient, not exploring any special properties of the medium itself. If
Sander's magazine gets most credit for quality of content, it should be noted that it
was closely followed by Trobar, Floating Bear, Yugen, El Corno Emplumado
and a host of others. Some magazines which only lasted an issue or two
had more impact than other, more staid vehicles that lasted for decades.

Poems Collected at Les Deux Megots, later renamed Poems from le Metro when
one coffee house closed and another replaced it, took advantage of the ease of
production and DIY features of mimeo. At each reading most if not all of the poets
who read brought typed mimeo stencils of one of the poems they would read, or
typed them on the spot, or went through the awkward task of writing them out
with a stylus. There was theoretically no editing of the poems and the collection
appeared as an issue of the magazine at the reading a week later. This may have
been the most democratic lit magazine of the time, a precursor of
Assembling and its heirs. It greatly benefited from the sense of immediacy
and personal exchange of the coffee house readings. Although this magazine took
advantage of mechanics of mimeo, it did nothing with mimeo tech. levy was one
of the few publishers of the time to replicate this process for the open reading
series, Poets at The Gate, assisted and continued by his friend rjs after he
ceased work on it.

levy was almost completely alone in making mimeo an art form in its own right,
and he certainly was better at it than anyone else. Almost from the beginning, he
seems to have been uneasy with the limited range of graphic possibilities in
standard mimeo. The first and easiest solutions to this were working with covers.
Silk screen and linoleum cuts could become collaborations with the artist who did
them. levy was an avid painter and collagist. With some of his books, he made
paintings on large sheets of heavy paper. He then cut them down into book-cover
size pieces and bound the books inside them. This made every cover unique, and it
gives current levy admirers shudders every time they hear about a library
rebinding one of levy's books.

Even with the best maintenance of a machine, mimeo tended to be sloppy. I didnít
like this and used a process called slip sheeting. As each sheet came out of the
cylinders, I dropped in a piece of cardboard so that the ink would not set off on the
next page to follow it, and to minimize smearing or blurring on the side just
printed. Clearly, although I appreciated and made use of the roughness around
letters, I was too young and too dumb to realize how much else I lost with this
fastidiousness. levy thought it was funny. He initially started setting up pages in
such a way that any smearing or set-off that occurred contributed to the feel of
immediacy and personal contact of the publication. This seems to have been
largely an intuitive process. I don't know how he did it, since many mimeo
productions done more or less the same way simply looked tacky. Taking a cue
from blurs and set-off, levy began overprinting texts, sometimes for visual effects
alone, sometimes as a technique to obscure some words while leaving others
visible, creating a new text out of an old. A number of other mimeographers had
reversed stencils, printing texts backward. This was almost invariably done to
produce results that were merely cute. levy worked reversed stencils in
conjunction with other print runs to produce meaningful interactions of directions.
His most resourceful use of mimeography came from over-inking stencils. Slight
overinks were one of the perennial annoyances for veteran mimeographers. In a
number of late works levy achieved a surprising range of text alteration and
abstract graphics through various degrees of over-inking and cylinder impression.
The initial results of these prints were often single sheets which he then had
reprinted offset so as not to disturb the imbalance he had set up. In this process, he
had completely jumped over the standard limitations of mimeo, turning it from
one of the most tediously restricted forms of letter reproduction into the tool for
one of the most dynamic forms of visual poetry of the era. If readers see the
mimeo revolution as a time of literary resurgence in such centers as New York and
San Francisco, itís important to realize that the medium as an art form achieved its
highest accomplishment in Cleveland, by a poet who wanted to civilize that city
by making it comparably creative to other places.

During his visits to New York, as his visits elsewhere, levy was collecting
addresses. I don't know if he met Ray Johnson in the city, but it's pleasant to think
that the patron saint of mail art might have helped him expand his network of
correspondence. Unwilling to rest on any laurels he may have won by publishing
new people, he used his growing readership as a means of expanding his range of
correspondence, his knowledge of literary and artistic movements, and his
understanding of Buddhism. In grim irony, some of the powers that were in
Cleveland didn't like the idea of being civilized or enlightened, particularly by
someone as unconventional as levy - and through their barbaric and disgraceful
treatment of him demonstrated just what shallow hicks they could be. At the same
time, the attacks on levy, which elsewhere might have seemed more like minor
rites of passage, made him both more resentful of the city and simultaneously
more committed to it. The persecution that followed his first arrest extended the
irony of the situation on another level: it generated sympathy for levy not only
throughout the U.S. but in other countries in the world. This extended the number
of people who wanted to be in contact with him. Even those put off by his
advocacy of consciousness-altering drugs or his notions of telepathy or his lengthy
meditations on suicide, not only rallied to his defense, they also gave him a more
serious reading as a poet and became part of his network of publication exchange.

The arrest of Jim Lowell and the way it firmly tied him to levy may have
augmented Asphodel's development from a small bookshop to a major organ of
distribution for books and information. Perhaps seeded by donations for defense
of levy and Asphodel which arrived through the mail and by levy's own mailing
list, the store's orientation moved farther away from in-person sales to mail order
transactions. This kept growing for at least a decade after levy's death. Not only
was Asphodel one of the first places to look for books of poetry not available
elsewhere and its catalogue a welcome item to find in the mailboxes of poetry
enthusiasts around the world, it became a clearing house for information as well. It
became a source of addresses for poets wishing to get in touch with each other.
Some simply sent mail with a poet or editor's address on it, with a request that
Lowell forward it to the addressee. The store resolved itself into a space divided
between it and Jim Lowell's wife's beauty parlor. This may seem a small and drab
conclusion for a bookstore under fire, but it kept the Cleveland area on the literary
map into the 1980s as a truly essential and indispensable national resource - a
status it didn't lose even as Lowell aged, slowed down, and succumbed to the
weariness and ill health of excessive alcohol use.

The "free levy" campaigns not only triginometrically expanded his
correspondences, they also brought visitors to Cleveland. The most important
were Allen Ginsberg and The Fugs, who came to do a benefit for his defense.
Despite the best intentions on the part of all involved, the circus this visit created
seems to have made levy's position more untenable than it had been. Had he been
willing to leave Cleveland after the fuss and pageantry, this event could have
served as a credential in career building for levy. But he didn't have any serious
intention of relocating in another city. From this point on, his life took on the
character of a Greek tragedy, with the protagonist moving inexorably toward death
by a fatal virtue. Certainly the "outside agitators" were the last form of civilization
and enlightenment any but a few of levy's friends in Cleveland were going to
tolerate. The city's newspapers had vacillated between defending and condemning
him. After the save levy event, the papers were as vehemently against him as was
the rest of local public opinion.

*

By the time I received the copies of Le lettrisme, levy's web of contacts
may have exceeded that of any other American poet under the age of 40. How
contact with other poets effected them is hard to say. When Geoffrey Cook, a poet
and rogue scholar who had been a friend of levy's, began a global letter writing
campaign to free Uruguayan dissident poets Clemente Padin and Jorge Caraballo,
he had levy's death in mind, and didn't want to see anything like it repeated
anywhere in the world. Dick Higgins, who may have met levy at Les Deux
Megots, posted a monetary security with the Uruguayan government which
secured the release of Padin and Caraballo under promise that they would leave
the country. Whether Higgins remembered levy from Les Deux Megots is
questionable, but he certainly would not have acted without Cook's campaign.
levy apparently met the Argentine poet and translator Miguel Grinberg in New
York, and Grinberg may have been instrumental in putting him in touch with other
Latin American poets. In the years since levy's death, I don't think one has gone
by in which I haven't bumped into a contact he'd made who was so unpredictable
and so outside the range attributed to him that I haven't had a brief "hunh?"
response - followed by an "of course" or a clicking into place of configurations I
hadn't previously understood. Among U.S. poets, his influence and the number of
his supporters have continued to grow. Although the process of expansion seems
to progress in waves, with sometimes long troughs between them, it seems clear
that although the advance toward consecration will probably continue to be fitful
and problematic, his influence will not cease expanding, and new individuals will
continue finding new dimensions and applications in his poetry.

Several years after levy's death, using the date "40071, reckoning roughly from
the earliest cave paintings," Gary Snyder wrote the only essay on levy of the
decade that both contained lasting insight and achieved wide circulation. In it,
Snyder wrote:

His hometown, Cleveland, that he wouldn't move from. Like
the Sioux warriors who tied themselves to a spear and stuck it
in the ground, never to retreat. Why? An almost irrational act
of love - to give a measure of self-awareness to the people of
Cleveland through poesy.

In this, he precisely defined levy's role in Cleveland and Cleveland's role in levy's
life and death in an immediate contextual frame. If we add to it that levy's love of
Cleveland included the desire to give it the opportunity to breathe, to have a living
relationship with the world outside, we expand the frame.

Snyder, perhaps more intuitively than consciously, was also registering the major
paradigm shift from the milieu of his own coming-of-age to levy's. This is where
levy's insistences on staying in Cleveland defined an era.

More than such period color as the hallucinogens which levy used parsimmoniusly
in practice and expansively in metaphor, or the fashions in clothing, or the manner
of speech, or topical allusions, or the specific rock lyrics of the day, the
counterculture of the late 60s made a demographic shift away from the Beats of
the previous decade. The Beats were essentially elitist, often traveling in small
hunting packs, but returning to the safety and tribal acceptance of arty dream
worlds in Greenwich Village and North Beach. They might make forays out into
the world of the squares, but their disdain for them, and desire to rob, exploit,
humiliate, or show them the maximum of contempt was dominant. The
counterculture of the 60s was just the opposite: it sought to include everyone. If it
wanted to assault the "straights," it sought to do so by absorbing them rather than
robbing them, to find a commonality of spirit that would put a final end to idiotic
wars, of which the one raging in Vietnam was the ultimate example, and replace it
with a society in which everyone practiced art and spiritual growth, explored the
many regions of consciousness, and bound itself together with an uninhibited
sexuality that began in individual erotic liberation but also sublimated itself into
universal well-being. Buddhism had spread through many underground channels
and flowered in the hometowns of North America in ways that no one could have
predicted a decade earlier.

levy's refusal to leave Cleveland, and his martyrdom as a result of it, do more to
define the era than film clips of Woodstock or the 1968 Democratic Party
Convention or the kids dancing around with painted faces in the Haight-Ashbury
district.

If the era, much scorned as it has been since, had an epicenter, it was a hyper-
active, fanatically hard working, scrawny, fidgety, malnourished kid with rotten
teeth, obsessed with giving away everything he could find or make and ready to
die to bring personal liberation to everyone, starting with the people of a mid-
sized, heavily polluted, factory city in the heart of America. The sentimental and
vapid media Beullahland concepts of "love" and "flower power" as an easy means
of escape wandered in and out of the counterculture, particularly as it moved into
the end of the 1960s and 1970s. The era would deserve the contempt and derision
it has received if it were indeed as phony as the media reduction of it, just as the
Paris Spring becomes nonsensical when commentators try to reduce it to students
taking over a country inspired by arcane comic books. Love is difficult, depends
on struggle and change. The self-centered eroticism of the Beats tended to miss it,
and certainly didn't seek to expand it to those outside their flock. levy's attempt to
make it grow, base it in interconnections, and make it available to everyone, also
makes it meaningful and worth the effort and sacrifice, whether it succeeded or
not. If the word "love," so much associated with the era carries levy's profound
intensity and insatiable desire for a new world, his complete willingness to give
everything he had, including his life, to distribute poetry and if possible use that as
a tool to bring humanity out of samsara, its meaning becomes substantial, cogent,
and something we could use today. In levy's case, however much the outlaw hype
follows him, such perennial virtues as commitment, dedication, generosity, and
untiring effort separate him from his persecutors, whose capacity for such
traditional values paled in comparison to his.

*

The entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Art features a large cast based on
Rodin's iconic sculpture, The Thinker. In 1970, insurrectionists tried to destroy it
with a hefty dynamite charge. The blast did severe damage, but did not completely
destroy the cast. The museum decided not to restore it or remove it, but to leave it
in place with the damage left as it was. Although no group claimed responsibility
for the bombing, the insurrectionists almost certainly had some idea who levy was,
and their rage may even have been encouraged to some extent by his martyrdom,
even though its primary target was probably the Vietnam War or social injustice of
some other sort. And the people of the city knew who levy was, even if few had
any idea how long the world's memory of him would last, or that in the next
millennium, books like this one would be published. Is it too fanciful to wonder if
the museum realized that the city had lost something important two years earlier
and did not want to be associated with the human vandalism that lead to his death?
Probably. Yet preserving The Thinker in semi-destroyed form suggests something
levy himself might do if he were running a mainstream museum. One of his
themes was the interdependence of creation and destruction. The books of
"destructive writing" such as The Tibetan Stroboscope used something
similar as an intentional working method. levy invented more literary forms than
any other young poet working in the U.S. in the 1960s. European classicism has
always made use of remnants of Mediterranean art partially destroyed by time, but
Cleveland has the only major museum I know with a piece of sculpture
intentionally mutilated in our own time at its main entrance.

The site contains a large selection of poems by levy, along with commentary and a
draft of the immaculate bibliography by Alan Horvath and Kent Tayler. It includes
the Snyder essay mentioned above, and work by several people slated for
appearance in this book. Going by my statistics generator, which indicates that
during some months more than 3,000 people access the site, it's safe to say that
more people have read levy's poetry here than in all print editions put together. In
some respects, the web is what levy would have seen as an ideal medium. This
should reinforce print rather than compete with it. Swanberg's print edition will
probably remain the definitive readers' edition for some time to come, and
probably form the base of other selections decades hence. Horvath's short-run,
intensive editions should form the ground for a collected works, and the critical,
annotated, and variorum editions that will probably appear as levy takes his place
among the major poets of his era. The web site's main function has been primarily
to keep readership growing and moving out of the ghetto where it has tended to
languish. The work Swanberg, Horvath, and I have done on paper and in
electronics suggests how much levy's news has stayed news, and the "mimeo
revolution" and Cleveland poetry scene of the 1960s have refused to stay in their
place.

I've tried to keep autobiography to a minimum in this essay. However, levy and
his example contributed to all sorts of things I've done during the 40 years since I
started publishing. Some of these are chronicled in a retrospective at this
location in Big Bridge magazine

They include moving from mimeo to offset and setting up The Water Street Arts
Center and its offspring, Woodland Pattern. Although there are no entries on the
contents pages for d.a.levy or Jim Lowell, both make regular appearances
throughout. A draft of the opening section of this essay appeared in the
Mail Art section of this series at Big Bridge.